Hidden text

Question

I work with word documents daily that other people will edit as well and some text becomes randomly hidden somehow. Is there a way to change it so that there cannot be hidden text in a document?

I know how to unhide it but not everyone who edits knows about it and they often don't realize they aren't viewing all text. So, I wonder if it can just be disabled?

Thank you,

Tania

Answer 1

Hi Tania,

*I'm going to disappoint you, I'm afraid.*There is no method to make a document editable that prevents text from being marked as hidden. It would be possible on a given computer to have fairly intrusive macros that would stop someone, on that computer, from formatting text as hidden. That would also only last as long as someone lets macros run.

This is a matter of training. I routinely run Word with non-printing marks showing, including hidden text. There is also the Document Inspector available under File > Info.

Metadata has been a problem with Word at least as long as it has had hidden text. There are other kinds of metadata as well that does not involve hidden text but can prove embarrassing. The Document Inspector can help with many of those issues as well as hidden text.

Please don't shoot the messenger! I am a fellow user trying to help you use the Office that is rather than the one that should be. If you assign a rating to my response, please rate my response, rather than what Microsoft is doing to all of us!

The people who can make changes to Word seldom, if ever, read anything that is posted in this help forum.

You can use the Feedback mechanism in Office or post directly to UserVoice to let developers know what you want.

https://support.office.com/article/How-do-I-giv...

If you do, you can include a link to this thread. If you do post in UserVoice, please put a link to that post in this thread so others can more easily find it to vote for it.

This forum is a user-to-user support forum. I am a fellow user.

I hope this information helps.

Please let me know if you have any more questions or require further help.

You can ask for more help by replying to this post (Reply button below).

Regards

Answer 2

If content is truly marked as hidden, then Suzanne's suggestion to use Ctrl+shift+H will "unhide" the selected content. The command is a toggle (hiding what is currently shown, showing what is currently hidden). To display text that is marked as hidden, you have to click the Show/Hide ¶ icon on the Home tab.

Answer 3

Note that if someone has run the Document Inspector and carried out the suggestions made by the Inspector, the affected content will be permanently removed, not just hidden from view.

Answer 4

The keyboard shortcut for formatting text is Ctrl+Shift+H. It's possible that users are pressing this inadvertently. Selecting all text (Ctrl+A) and pressing Ctrl+Spacebar will remove direct font formatting (including the Hidden property), but that is pretty drastic since it would remove intentional font formatting.

Answer 5

Thank you for your reply, I would never shoot the messenger! The problem with document inspector is when you "fix" the issues it finds it doesn't show you where it is fixing things. The text that gets accidentally hidden often times needs to stay so I don't want to remove it.

I'm not sure how stuff is getting hidden. I am the tech editor and sometimes it hides things for me to. I will open a document, type something in and it is automatically marked as hidden (I can see it right away because I always work with that little paragraph marker thing turned on).

But we are having issues because we have hundreds of people who have documents that we help them revise and edit. These documents go out for reviews with their peers. Most of these people are not very good with word so they have no idea about hidden text and how to see it, or what it even is. There have been instances where reviewers have made comments in the documents and even the comments are marked as hidden. The document owner doesn't see these hidden comments and things are missed! It's been very frustrating.

Thank you again though for your reply :)